The filesystem became damaged on my 500GB HFS+ HD and would not mount. The vast majority of the data is image (JPEG + NEF) and .avi files.

I am in the process of recovering the data using PhotoRec, which is proving to be a long and CPU intensive process....

however... so far it has been running over 24h and so far no JPEG files have been recovered, mostly txt files, should I have enabled BruteForce?

Also, can the process be stopped mid recovery without causing any damage or canceling the process? I need to eject the damaged drive and recovery drive to get online, and I was wondering if I did this, could I restart the recovery from where it left off? Also, my poor mac could do with cooling down....